I had no time to wonder or worry over Kei’s withdrawal. Later, lying in bed in the room I shared with Kei, alert in case Mama got up and started fretting around the house, I was also attuned to Kei’s quick breathing. I was waiting for our dark conversations.
“What are we going to do?”
It was the only thought chasing itself through my head. Though the fight we had earlier still hung between us, night was always different. In the dark, we decided not to “see” our daytime problems. That was when we talked, though sometimes we didn’t talk to each other as much as out loud, letting our voices float between us, but still in each other’s presence. Night was a time when either one of us could confess anything, without judgment, and be released. We were each other’s record keepers, and it was important to have a record. However strange it may seem to someone else, the events of our lives had no weight, and might never have happened, until they were offered to the other as a silent witness.
But that night, Kei didn’t answer. I was no longer thinking about how she had tried to trick me, or about her strange obsession with the wave. My worry was for Mama. I assumed Kei’s was, too, and that it was guilt that kept her from answering me. First, she thrashed and muttered as if she was having nightmares. Then she quieted—she was trying to make sure I was asleep. For a long time, it was just me and Kei’s smothering silence. Then I heard her sit up. I must have thought she was going to the bathroom. My back was to her bed. I wasn’t to blame; that was what I tried to tell myself later. I didn’t hear her get dressed. Nor did my carefully closed eyes see her creeping to the door.
1945
Lillie slid the outer door shut and called out from the genkan.
—Otou-sama, tadaima!
She imagined Donald’s father twisting in bed at the sound of her footsteps, readying the curses he had been building all day to spew on her.
—Worthless girl. You could bring me a bit of rice.
—How can a son show such disrespect for his father? How could he leave me here with you?
Her father-in-law’s bitterness had grown worse since Donald fled with Toshi. A real man, he complained, would not hide behind his child. His son should be striking a blow against America, his enemy, a country that stole all he owned, arrested and tortured him, then killed his wife after he was dragged away, unable to defend her. Lillie had heard these stories every day, tossed in Tateishi-sama’s mouth like small stones in a fast-moving river. She knew his version, and her own, and in the end there was not as much difference between them as she wished.
Would the old man spit at Hanako, too, when she walked in, or would he be stunned into silence by a stranger in his house? Don’t tell him, Hanako had said. I want to see his old coot’s face when it’s me who comes to give him his baby food.
It was Hanako’s suggestion that Lillie go to the country to see Toshi. Lillie had had no word from Donald since they left, and she couldn’t bear to be away from her boy any longer. Besides, the doctors were saying that her father-in-law was dying. He might only have a few days more. Tateishi-sama had hated her as long as he’d known her, but Lillie knew Donald would surely want to pay his last respects.
Hanako insisted Lillie go. She would cover Lillie’s shift at the castle, spinning some story about how Lillie was deathly, if temporarily, ill. “We’ll switch places,” Hanako told her. “It’s just for a day.” Lillie felt the fierce pull of her son. She hadn’t seen him in so long. But it was Hanako’s help that assured her it was possible: Lillie would, indeed, be gone only one day.
—Otou-sama?
She called again, knowing he could still hear and that when she stepped out of the genkan he would be there smack in the middle of the main room, coiled in the sheet on his futon, where he had been for months. Donald had moved him there, insisting the old man wouldn’t feel so lonely as long as he could watch her prepare the food and clean up afterward. Before Donald left with Toshi, the three of them slept in the small room, which she had to herself now. So much space compared to the places she’d lived in since she left the farm. She’d thought about inviting Hanako to live here with her, to get her out of the tiny room she shared with two other girls and give the friends an opportunity to talk in more than spurts and whispers. If Donald was in a good mood when she saw him today, she might ask his permission, but it would depend on what Hanako wanted.
She would raise the subject with Hanako when she returned.
Lillie had pitched her voice low the second time she called out so she wouldn’t wake her father-in-law if he was sleeping. Hearing nothing, she slipped on a pair of soft house slippers and moved quietly into the main room. The old man’s eyes were closed and his breathing shallow, though still steady. He had taken to dropping off in midsentence recently, dozing against his will even when he was trying to ask for something. He’d also acquired a thin, sour smell, which Lillie had worked hard to scrub away, even loosening the long length of fabric—now yellow and brown with age—that he still used to keep the tin box of his wife’s ashes strapped to his chest. He had wept when she lifted the box, cursed her as much out of rage as sorrow. If he’d remembered how she had cared for his wife, how she had cleaned her and soothed her and combed her hair when she was ill, he might not be so irate that Lillie would dare to touch her now. But perhaps it was the separation that undid him, the breath of air that came between him and his wife’s ashes, even for a moment, when Lillie untied the tin box.
For all her efforts, though, the smell remained. It seemed to be coming, not from the old man’s private joints and crevices, but from inside.
Was it better to postpone her trip in case he was dying quickly now, or try to bring Donald home to say good-bye?
Hanako would say, “Go.” It was her last word to Lillie when they parted this morning. She had pressed a small bean cake into Lillie’s hand. “For Toshi,” Hanako said, and hugged her hard. Lillie stared at the round confection as if she had never seen one, and indeed the first and last time was when she was still in Los Angeles, in Little Tokyo. Only Hanako could get her hands on something so precious. In fact, the most precious gift she’d received was also from Hanako: a photograph of her son.
Lillie carried it everywhere with her, took it out to look at it hundreds of times a day. It was taken just a few days after she started working at the castle. A group of journalists were coming in to take propaganda photos, and Lillie and all the other translators who were mothers were asked to bring their children in that day for the shoot. The pictures were to prove that Japan was winning the war, that it was a place of family and safety, and that the Emperor loved children so much that he would let them play on the grass in the castle garden while their mothers were working. But as soon as the journalists left, the children were hustled off into a corner to wait for their mothers to be done with their shifts. Lillie never expected to see the images. But somehow, Hanako had charmed one of the photographers into bringing her a copy of a picture of Toshi, wearing the sailor outfit they had dressed him in for the occasion, in the moment when he had reached up to ask Lillie to swing him into her arms.
Now Lillie traced the edge of the image, remembering. He was the only little boy with hair, a helicopter of it; the rest of them had just shadows on their shaved heads. It was proof that she was too American, and the only fight with Donald that she’d ever won. She wondered now if that was how Hanako had gotten the photo, if it was because her son was unusable. Embarrassing to the Emperor, who only liked good Japanese.
Hanako would just have shrugged if Lillie asked her. Just like she would shrug now about the old man Lillie was leaving in her care. It’s not like I can’t roll some dead guy up in a sheet if I need to, she would say. Hell, he won’t smell any worse by the time you get home.
Hanako’s voice was still in Lillie’s head, whispering to her, as she tucked Toshi’s picture back into the fold of her kimono and then stooped to pick up the indigo blue bowl her mother had given her so long ago. She washed her father-in-law’s soup out of
it and left it on the dish rack. The house was in order. Hanako would show up this evening to feed Tateishi-sama, and Lillie didn’t want to make a bad impression. Then she closed the door again and began walking, through the hot August morning, to the train.
Lillie knew that Donald had taken Toshi to his family’s house, north of the city, where they’d gone first when they arrived. She hadn’t been back since, but the journey there remained fresh in her mind, imprinted as it was in the first months before the rest of Japan had overlapped it, and she followed her memory easily from the train station, past the first five turns and to the right until at last she came to a place she recognized. Or thought she did. The cherry tree near the front door had been stripped of its leaves, but she was sure she recognized the arrangement of rocks along the walk.
The windows were shuttered. The heavy wooden amado doors stood closed in the heat of the summer when most buildings had peeled back even their thin shoji screens to let the air circulate as much as possible. When she knocked, there was no sound, not even an echo. No one came to the door. She knew then, but still, she pounded on the doors and called Toshi’s name. It came to her that perhaps this was a joke. Perhaps they were hiding from her, preparing to surprise her to make their reunion better, even though of course they had no idea she was coming. Lillie let herself imagine Toshi’s face, lit with laughter, when she finally discovered him in hiding, even as she found herself sagging against the door. A truth was tiptoeing toward her, one she was not prepared to receive.
That was when the woman appeared. She came not from that house but the one next door, an older woman who looked much like Donald’s mother had. Was she one of the family around them when Lillie and Donald arrived? Everyone looked so much older now.
—Aunt…
—Shame on you!
Lillie tried to explain who she was, stumbling over her honorifics, knowing she would need to sound the right note to get help. The woman’s face twisted.
—Go away. There is no one.
—But, then, where? Do you know where they are?
—Gone. Never here. Go away, stupid girl.
The woman was lying. They were here, or had been. If Lillie had any doubt about being in the right place, it was gone as soon as she heard the epithet.
—He’s my son. My husband. Please, I have news.
The woman was emboldened by her pleading.
—You are nothing.
—Tateishi is dying. There’s not much time.
Did the so-called neighbor flinch at Lillie’s words? The woman barely paused long enough to hear them. “No one,” she said, the momentum of her outrage carrying her over the news. “Go away.”
—No.
If he had been there. If either of them had. If the house hadn’t been so strangely unused in a time of shortages everywhere, Lillie might have obeyed. But she had to find Toshi. She forced open the doors and went through every room, checking for a sign of her son, pushing the neighbor off when she tried to stop her. “It’s my house. My family,” Lillie said, as defiant as Hanako would have been if she had been there. By then, she was certain that Donald was on the run again, whether from the military or because he had decided to steal Toshi from her, she didn’t know. But this was where he had been heading, and with the woman’s insistence that she leave, she was sure he had at least been here, so there had to be a trail.
—Where is he? Where’s my son?
The woman followed, berating her, indignant. Maybe it was the speed of the woman’s speech, or the fact that she did not want to hear what the woman was saying, but Lillie could not make out a word. With every closet opened, every sliding partition, the search was over quickly. There were not even beds for them to hide under.
The house was empty.
By the time Lillie gave up searching, the whole neighborhood was watching her. Standing in their small yards or peering out their windows, so many heads nodding that she didn’t belong there, even as they seemed to know exactly who she was. She stepped outside, her eyes drawn past the gawkers to the closed doors of the houses around her. Had Donald truly left, or was he hiding inside one of them, refusing to emerge even for his own wife?
—Toshi! she screamed. “Toshi, it’s Mama!” The words ripped her throat. “Donald, it’s me! Your father is dying. Do you hear me? There’s no time left. You must come back.”
She was airing all their ugly, dirty laundry, but she didn’t care. She was American. She could be so crass, especially if there was any chance at all that her son would answer. She wasn’t them, and she never would be.
The houses around her echoed back only silence.
That was when Lillie imagined planting herself in the middle of the small patch of yard, waiting motionless like a statue until her husband and son returned. It could take months, she thought. Years. She could become some kind of saint: the mother who never left. The mother who didn’t make the wrong decisions, or lose too much. Who didn’t fight too hard or not enough. Lillie wanted to turn into a tree, into stone, dissolve into the ether. How much easier it would be to stop, to stay there forever, frozen in time.
Toshi…She felt herself crack.
But when she got back to the train station, she couldn’t bring herself to leave, either. Despite how Donald had treated her, she couldn’t bear to think of her husband as a human bomb, trying to hug a tank. The smart thing would have been to flee with Toshi, and the only question was to where, and had he made it? If he hadn’t…She shuddered to think about her son, orphaned and unfindable in the hands of the military, instead of with Donald’s family, no matter how awful that woman had just been to her.
Donald and Toshi had to be together. And if they were, perhaps someone here at the train station might know which way they went. A man of military age traveling alone with a young boy wouldn’t be a common sight.
No.
She held out Toshi’s photo to the station workers and the few, battered travelers who came in to wait for the trains. “Have you seen this little boy?” she asked. They tried to move off in another direction when they saw her coming toward them. There were so many beggars in those days, and even those who weren’t begging were out in public in patched clothing, down to their last shoes. Lillie could sometimes get them to glance at the photo if they thought it would help them get away, or if they were stuck at their posts, unable to disappear. It wasn’t that she expected anyone to recognize Toshi, or even speak to her, but she couldn’t sit on the wooden bench without trying.
A wave of fatigue overwhelmed her each time she heard the whistle of a train. Lillie watched them pull into the station and then go on. There weren’t so many, maybe only one or two in each direction. She could no more get up to board one than she could fly.
There was an old peddler selling a few used trinkets on the ground near the station. She had shown the woman Toshi’s photo twice already, but when the last train of the day passed and the peddler started putting away her things, she went back one last time. Watching the careful way the woman went about fitting each item into her single wooden box, she suddenly missed her own mother.
Foster mother, Donald would have reminded her, who never answered your pleas for help. But Lillie held the fading gold hair in her memory. The hands that made her quilt. Lillie thought back to their parting: a scene that had almost never left her mind. She hadn’t promised to come home, she realized now; she had promised to remember them. And more than that, to remember they loved her.
Now, the possibility of love almost knocked Lillie to her knees.
At the top of the peddler’s box, already packed, was a wooden yo-yo. The crude curves splintered on Lillie’s fingertips, but she could polish them with sand and stones. Toshi would be three on his next birthday. Whether it was a delusion or her own promise that she would find him, the toy made her feel lighter. She gave the peddler the bean cake Hanako had given her in exchange, thinking the old woman might share it, that she might stay and talk. But the peddler tucked it carefully into the s
pace where the yoyo had been and said good night.
—Please, Lillie said then. “Just look. One more time.”
The peddler held Toshi’s photo. Lillie stood beside her, drinking in her son’s wild black hair and his joyous face as he looked up at her. She remembered that white sailor suit with red trim, but even before that, she remembered the soft fat of his knees and elbows, which Japan had melted away. By now, she did not expect that the woman would magically remember him. She just needed a witness. Someone who knew he was loved.
It was a hot night. Once the station had emptied, and the remaining passengers waiting for the morning train had settled onto benches and along walls, Lillie lay down where she could see the stars. She had no concern for herself, what she must look like. It didn’t matter. She was entirely alone. The stars were so close, and she looked for a new one, twinkling brightly just as her father had once showed her: that would be a new soul saying good-bye. She knew the stars well, even in that sky, and when none of them called to her, she took comfort in the knowledge that Toshi was surely alive and on earth somewhere, perhaps in Tokyo where the Embassy people had first urged them to go.
She would find him.
Aunt Suzy and Uncle Joe love little children, Hanako had said. Forget those inu. I’ll do your shift for you—I’ll hold them off. Go get your baby. And when this war is over, we’ll all go home. Lillie held on to her friend’s words as an anchor.
It was impossible to sleep.
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